Monthly Archives: October 2011

it’s almost 3 years now since Terrin passed away, and through the magic of the internet i am able to bring you this old interview from like 2001 or something that i did. it was a pretty weird afternoon, thinking back. Terrin and his wife were honeymooning in Europe and he called me up, asking if i wanted to meet up and do an interview. i had never spoken to him before, and being a terrible unsociable geek, was more than a little bit nervous about it. i shouldn’t have been, i had a tonne of fun, and i hope this interview goes some way to showing that. thanks to Terrin, you are missed.

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this interview was conducted whilst sitting on a wooden bench on Elm Hill, Norwich. it gave us green butts. it was damn good fun, and i am very grateful for spending a couple of hours in the time of Terrin and his lovely wife Adrienne. they are the nicest folks, do ya hear! ok, here is what we talked about, i edited out a tonne of it because people don’t normally go around printing their conversations on the internet. so i just left in the stuff that i guess you could consider more ‘relevant’, and some of the fun bits that were almost relevant. whatever, it was all enjoyed. take it away…

terrin: (into dictaphone in cockney accident) brilliant

andy: right! ok, so introduce yourself and what you’re doing over here!

terrin: blahblahblah, this is Terrin from Boilermaker, i am on my honeymoon with my beautiful wife, Adrienne…

andy: who’s just disappeared off down the road somewhere

terrin: yeah, she’s just checking out the artists gallery

andy: the bear shop

terrin: and the stamp corner

andy: ok, we’re sitting down Elm Street here in norwich, a bit of old school Norwich to show the American tourists, and really impress them and let them see what England is all about

terrin: it looks like Disneyland (laughs)

andy: ok, we’ll start with the band… Boilermaker having just reformed… did you ever split up or was it on hiatus?

terrin: 2 years. it was a 2 year long tour where we didn’t play any shows, and we played for coming up 6 years, and we all went our seperate ways and started doing other things. our drummer moved up to san francisco, and i joined the Farewell Bend and was gone for a while, but that didn’t work out. so i came back, and then what basically got us back together again was that we got the rights to our old records back. we’d been waiting for about 6 years for that to happen, and i think we just went through periods of time in our lives where our music styles changed, and we had differences, though never any fights or anything like that. kind of all of us were going our seperate ways with music. and being away from it, it’s like we all went it routes of jobs and school, the guitar player went into school and had to drive 45 minutes to an hour to get to school for the last 2 or 3 years.

andy: just the kind of things that makes it hard for a band to get together.

terrin: yeah. besides all the other personal stuff in our lives, and doing music became the thing which we needed a break from.

andy: so is it all the same members back together?

terrin: yeah, all the same members, and a friend of ours called Mike who is sitting in and playing guitar with us at the moment, adding some stuff that we never had before into our shows. i don’t know, i think all of us being away from it, it made us all realise how much we liked playing music, and playing with other people, made us realise how much we liked playing with each other. we never really made any money, but it just worked. we felt that what we had always written together, even though we came from different aspects of music, that what made it work for us was the combination of these things coming together.

andy: were you still writing songs even when you were taking a break from things?

terrin: well, i was working probably between 10 – 13 hours a day, monday to friday for the last 3 years. and it was something that i thought about every day. not a day would go by where i wouldn’t think about writing new songs and thinking about music. i just never really found the time to put towards it. so after 3 years it was starting to get really frustrating, and i was itching to play music again. basically my job ended just at the exact same time that we were talking about making these 2 new songs, so it was perfect timing. we worked on the songs, and started writing them, and Tim (drummer) came down from San Francisco and then we got out our recording stuff, went to a friends house and recorded the drums. and then we had about a good month where we just would do the rest, working on vocals and adding everything. and we did it all at home, so it was the first time we really got to sit down and spend the time on each song, as far as what we wanted to add to it, rather than going and paying thousands of dollars for a couple of hours to record.

andy: where it’s more pressurised… so, do you think the music has kind of changed, or the same kind of direction that you were going in before?

terrin: these 2 new songs are pretty different, i think there’s, well, both of them are pretty slow. if you listen to like the old records, there’s some faster songs on them

andy: the records got slower from the first to the last…

terrin: yeah, but i that came from us getting older, so we’re all 27, 28 years old, when we started it was like 1992, and we were fresh out of high school, just getting out of our punk rock phase.

andy: (laughs) yeah, just make a noise…

terrin: yeah, we still had this noise, and not aggression, but we came from that punk rock…

andy: a bit more hardcore sounding…

terrin: yeah, even though i never considered us hardcore, or punk or anything like that. but we come from those roots.

andy: those were the kind of bands you were associated with, like you were on the Tree Records comp with all those other emo bands (Indian Summer, Embassy, Current…).

terrin: yeah, i mean that was maybe our 3rd or 4th song… so it was a natural progression that a lot of bands take as you start getting older. we don’t feel a need to play the hardest parts. it’s more about, i want to hear some music than i can relax to. i don’t want to feel that i am going crazy and on edge…. (pause) ….i don’t really know where i was going with that!

andy: that’s ok! you’ve played your first show back as a band, in San Diego?

terrin: actually, it was really really good. we played at this place called the Che Cafe in San Diego, and that was the place where i first started going to shows in high school. it didn’t even matter what bands were playing, we would just show up every friday night, ‘oh we gotta go to the che cafe’…

andy: just somewhere to hang out…

terrin: yeah, somewhere to hang out and see some bands we’ve never seen. so it was really comforting to come back and play our first show back in a place that we were really familiar with and a place that, for me, felt like it was my home. that was where i was seeing shows from day one. and it helped that it was a sold out show. people seemed really excited to see us again.

andy: it was encouraging that people still cared enough to come a long…

terrin: yeah, exactly.

andy: sorry! i just turned it off. (referring to the tape)

terrin: (into mic) unfortunately we went to starbucks. damn us! we try not to support corporate america.

andy: no! down with corporate america!

terrin: especially not a corporate america in europe!

andy: who don’t take your card.

terrin: exactly!

andy: we’ll go and fire bomb it later! (laughs) alright, so you’ve been over to europe with the Farewell Bend, very briefly. so how long were you over then?

terrin: we came over for a month.

andy: that’s quite a long time!

terrin: it wasn’t long enough!

andy: really? did you get to look around or just play, play, play?

terrin: it was pretty much like driving 8 hours from show to show. sit down and have dinner with people from the shows. when we first tried to come over we got stopped in dover, we didn’t have our working papers. and then finally they let us in. they sent us back from dover the first day – saying ‘no working papers, you’re kicked out of the country’. we paid something like $250 to get the ferry across. and then they sent us back and we spent the night in calais, france. and they put us in the holding cell for six hours in dover!

andy: like you’re an asylum seeker or something! (laughs)

terrin: we said to them, we’re not going to play any shows… but all of our places to stay are in the UK. so we can either go and sit in France for 6 days, or we can go and stay with the people we planned on staying with. so we lied, and played all the shows. and the only problem was, coming over to Europe this time. in my passport, it’s stamped that i’ve been denied.

andy: so you’re a marked man.

terrin: yeah, so the lady in customs was kinda giving us a hard time when we showed up.

andy: maybe she thought you were coming over to busk in the streets on your own.

terrin: yeah! she gave us the whole line of questionning on why we got kicked out before and she didn’t believe it! finally she gave Adrienne the 6 month stamp, and she looked at me, and, i don’t know, she wasn’t very nice… i don’t know where i am going with this story! (laughs) actually she asked if i had any friends in the UK, and i said, yeah, i have a friend in Norwich, but actually i pronounced it norwick. so she got mad! like ‘WHERE? WHERE DOES HE LIVE?”. i don’t know, Norwick, Norwich?

andy: yeah, it’s Norwich. it doesn’t look like it at all, a lot of people would say the same. it’s english names for you. (proceeds to talk about about Wymondham and Chichester)

terrin: ok, so i went to stonehenge yesterday, quite an amazing experience. we visited and saw all our hippy friends there (laughs)

andy: did they pass round any illicit substances for you?

terrin: oh, i wish! (laughs)

andy: dance around the stone circle…

terrin: oh yeah, pray to the druids. (there was then some random chat about these and woodhenge and seahenge too)

terrin: yeah, sorry about that. (laughs) we are actually supposed to do a US tour, and it seems like at the moment it’s not working out so we are kind of postponing that, and spending time making a new record. and i’m trying to work on getting something set up for europe. we’ve done the US like 4 or 5 times. i think touring over in europe with the Farewell Bend made me realise how awesome Europe is. it’s a different experience coming over to Europe. right next door you have people speaking different languages, and you can drive 2 or 3 hours to get to a different country. and it’s amazing coming over. today everythings so close because of the internet. but it’s just awesome to come over to different countries, and to have people who have heard of your music, whether it’s 1 person, 2 people, 20 or 100 people. it’s really a fantastic experience to know that somehow they’ve heard it. like we went to Prague, with Farewell Bend, and this kid who let us stay at his house… we were sitting there with nothing to do and i was flicking through his 7″ collection, to see what he was interested in. like what do kids in Prague listen to? and it was the weirdest thing, because i knew bands from every other record. like ‘i know that band’ and finally we got through and there was a Boilermaker 7″ in there. and i was ‘oh my god! how does this kind find this in czechoslavakia’ when there are kids 15 miles away from us who wouldn’t know about it. it’s amazing.

andy: cool. so you’re off to ireland, looking forward to that?

terrin: yeah, definitely. gonna go to dublin, go golfing! where it all originated.

andy: gonna get the big old trousers and funny hat.

terrin: yeah, Payne Stewart style.

andy: yeah, a bit of old school golf there.

terrin: we’re gonna go stay with Redneck Manifesto. give a shout out to Redneck Manifesto! bunch of great guys, fantastic band. they’re gonna put us up with a place to stay. stay a couple of days…

andy: sit in Irish bars? (laughs)

terrin: have some warm Guinness. (we then discuss beer)

andy: and then off to mainland Europe after that?

terrin: yeah, we’re gonna go pretty much all over. gonna stay with some people we met on the Farewell Bend tour. and we’ve rented a car and drive all round and sit in traffic.

andy: how do you find driving on the wrong side of the road over here? (laughs)

terrin: actually we weren’t planning on that! i think what made us rent the car was that we wanted to go see Stonehenge, rather than take a 6 hour bus ride. (we talk about driving and Terrin is proud he hasn’t driven the wrong way down any streets yet. then it all just goes all over the shop, talking about bowling alleys, and Toys R Us, Thunderbirds and Zippy from Rainbow, adverts before films, and it was all good fun but you probably don’t want to read this stuff!)

andy: so maybe you should start busking, put a hat down and people will come a long and pay you money. raise money for the rest of the tour

terrin: i thought about that. maybe that’s what boilermaker should do. a street tour.

andy: yeah! we get these guys coming over from Peru, dressed up in Peruvian gear with pan pipes and stuff!

terrin: would we need a permit for that?

andy: well it seems they let people in until it comes to the people who come to make money. there seems to be a kind of odd approach to it.

terrin: it’s because they want their cut. they don’t want people sneaking in and making money. (we then talk about VAT and taxes. woo woo! Terrin and Adrienne are pretty shocked at the 17.5% rate!)